Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, is a common method for content marketing. Feeds are used to share your content with RSS readers of all kinds. For example, users can connect a WordPress custom RSS feed directly to their Netvibes accounts for the latest news. But what if you have categories...
Tag: RSS
👓 Farewell Social Media | James Shelley
James Shelley (jamesshelley.com)I recently purged the data from my Facebook account. This effort was shockingly labour intensive: it took a browser script all weekend to crunch, and still many aspects of the process required manual execution. Torching years and years of old Facebook activity felt so liberating that I found another...
A short, but solid piece on why James has left social media and consciously moved to his own blog and feed reader. I’m curious what his thoughts are a bit on into his experience. He’s definitely worth a follow.
👓 Feeds and Gardens | Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)My last post, Connections, gathered a fair bit of response — enough that you can see a good example of Webmentions in action below it. There’s a little back-and-forth discussion there that mostly took place on Twitter, as well as a lot of likes and mentions that came from there as well.
Reply to Sara Soueidan about front end development feeds
Sara Soueidan (Twitter)If you have a blog and write/share useful things (big or small) about Web design / front-end dev and you provide an RSS feed to the blog, please respond to this tweet w/ the URL for it — I’d like to add more useful content feeds to my reader.
— Sara Soueidan (@SaraSoueidan) July 20, 2018
I tinker on my own website and frequently write about IndieWeb related technologies because the web is my social media platform. The feed you might appreciate most is https://boffosocko.com/category/indieweb/feed/.
I have feeds for nearly every tag/category or post type on my site for convenience (just add /feed/ to almost anything). You could subscribe to my firehose feed, but I suspect even my mother would tire of it quickly.
I’m curious if you have OPML files or similar bundles of feeds you follow that are shareable or subscribe-able?
👓 ds106: Will Work for Feed Syndication Framework | bavatuesdays
Note: I spent a bit of time this morning editing and cleaning up this post because upon re-reading it—which as usual was well after I published it—I thought there were a few things I co…
A tough problem in teaching. Perhaps an advanced version of a planet or using OPML subscription would help out? I also suspect that microsub may be a potential solution.
Reply to This Indispensable Digital Research Tool, We can Say, Without Lying, Saves Time
People will claim they can replace RSS Readers with social media streams like twitter. While we do get many key resources and news stories via social media, let’s dispute that claim:
- Clutter, noise, distraction. What you get is interspersed with many things that are outside your interests, rants, yelling, silly gifs. That’s a lot of filtering.
- You Miss It, You Lose it. Social media is focused at the head of the stream. While you sleep or actually do something productive away from social media, it all flows away. Yes, maybe your network can signal with repeating important things, but its spotty.
- Duplication You have no means to quickly know what you have already looked at, and you see may the same story multiple times.
- You Are Subject to Algorithms Especially on facebook, what you see is determined by the mysteries of an algorithm. Sure you choose sources by followers, but the means by which information is presented is determined by some outside automated entity.
This activity brings you an exception to the technology as time-saving lie; it’s old tool that many people have abandoned. I will wade carefully through the acronym jargon jungle, but we are talking about using an RSS Feed Reader to monitor the most recent news, blog posts, data from sources you choose to follow, not ones dished out by some company’s algorithm.
RSS is incredibly valuable as is OPML.
I had used Feedly for several years, but made the switch to Inoreader last year, in part because it has one additional useful feature that Feedly doesn’t: OPML subscription. While it’s nice to be able to import and export OPML files, needing to remember to update them can be an unnecessary step, particularly if 20+ people need to do the update to capture all the new RSS feeds added. (As an example, say one or two students join a class late and everyone has already got the original OPML export and now needs to update to add a few more feeds to keep track of classroom activity.) OPML subscription improves this by allowing the subscription to an OPML link with multiple feeds in it. If the original OPML file updates with new feeds, then the reader automatically updates them and pushes them out to everyone subscribed to that OPML file!
Think of an OPML subscription as an updating subscription to a bundle of RSS feeds which all also provide their own individual updates. Instead of subscribing to a bunch of individual feeds, you can subscribe to whole bundles of feeds.
For those looking for some sample OPML links to subscribe to, try some of mine which are listed at the bottom of the linked page. For some ideas about building your own data stores with OPML links for WordPress, try my Following Page solution. WordPress’s old Link Manager described on that page will provide the ability to store the data and provide the OPML links, the rest of the page discusses publishing it on one’s site so that it’s publicly available if you wish. URL schemes for sub-categories are discussed separately.
👓 This Indispensable Digital Research Tool, We can Say, Without Lying, Saves Time | Extend Activity Bank
I sometimes tell people that when technology evangelists espouse that their tool saves you time, that it’s a red flag warning / code talk for “I am lying”. These days many people rely on social media and their own professional learning networks to provide them information of interest. And these do work well to some degree... <a href="https://extend-bank.ecampusontario.ca/assignments/indispensable-tool/" class="more-link" title="Read This Indispensable Digital Research Tool, We can Say, Without Lying, Saves Time">Read more »</a>
👓 RSS is Not Dead: FreshRSS in Installatron | Tim Owens
It all begins with a tweet (pay not attention to the fact I'm no longer on Twitter)@ReclaimHosting Is NewsBlur something that would install on a Reclaim server? Looks like perhaps too many moving parts. (Looking for an alternative to TinyRSS) https://t.co/UoWItuDBkW— Mark Sample (@samplereality) July
👓 Links, tags, and feeds | Adactio.com
Basically, if something on my site is a list of items, chances are there’s a corresponding RSS feeds. Sometimes there might even be a JSON feed. Hack some URLs to see. Meanwhile, I’ll be linking, linking, linking…
Reply to Flogging the Dead Horse of RSS by Dean Shareski
Dean Shareski (Ideas and Thoughts)And I think it’s true. I don’t use RSS the way I did in 2004. That said, I remember reading that blogging was dead ten years ago. And while it’s maybe not trendy, many educators have seen its value and maintained a presence. Apparently, RSS has some valid uses as well but like most everyone, I tend to use social as a place to find new and emerging ideas. But I also think using Twitter and Facebook to haphazardly find content lacks intention and depth. I also value reading a person’s blog over time to understand better their voice and context. So I’m asking for some advice on how to update my module on finding research. What replaces RSS feeds? What works for you that goes beyond “someone on Twitter/Facebook shared….” to something that is more focused and intentional?
Dean, I can completely appreciate where you’re coming from. I too am still addicted to RSS (as well as a plethora of other feed types including Atom, JSON, and h-feeds). I didn’t come across your article by feed however, but instead by Aaron Davis’ response to your post which he posted on his own website and then pinged my site with his repsonse using a web specification called Webmention. We’re both members of a growing group of researchers, educators, and others who are using our own websites to act as our social media presences and using new technologies like Webmention to send notifications from website to website to carry on conversations.
While many of us are also relying on RSS, there are a variety of new emerging technologies that are making consuming and replying to content online easier while also allowing people to own all of their associated data. In addition to my article about The Feed Reader Revolution which Aaron mentioned in his reply, Aaron Pareck has recently written about Building an IndieWeb Reader. I suspect that some of these ideas encapsulate a lot of what you’d like to see on the web.
Most of us are doing this work and experimentation under the banner known as the IndieWeb. Since you know some of the web’s prior history, you might appreciate this table that will give you some idea of what the group has been working on. In particular I suspect you may appreciate some of the resources we’re compiling for IndieWeb for Education. If it’s something you find interest in, I hope you might join in our experimentations. You can find many of us in the group’s online chat.
I would have replied in your comments section, but unfortunately through a variety of quirks Disqus marks everything I publish to it immediately as spam. Thus my commentary is invariably lost. Instead, I’m posting it to a location I do have stricter control over–my own website. I’ll send you a tweet to provide you the notification of the post. I will cross-post my reply to Disqus if you want to dig into your spam folder to unspam it for display. In the meanwhile, I’m following you and subscribing to your RSS feed.
👓 Flogging the Dead Horse of RSS | Ideas and Thoughts
I have included a module on RSS to allow my students to create their own research teams on topics of interest. Because I’m old, I still have my students set up Feedly accounts and plug in the RSS feeds of their classmates and hopefully add other blogs to their feeds as well. And like blogging, I realize only a handful will continue but I want to expose them to the power of sharing their own research/learning via blogging and how to find others who do as well via Feedly.
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
Because I’m old, I still have my students set up Feedly accounts and plug in the RSS feeds of their classmates and hopefully add other blogs to their feeds as well. And like blogging, I realize only a handful will continue but I want to expose them to the power of sharing their own research/learning via blogging and how to find others who do as well via Feedly. ❧
I also value reading a person’s blog over time to understand better their voice and context. So I’m asking for some advice on how to update my module on finding research. What replaces RSS feeds? What works for you that goes beyond “someone on Twitter/Facebook shared….” to something that is more focused and intentional? ❧
👓 Microsub and the new reader evolution | skippy.net
Scott Merrill (skippy.net)I was an avid Google Reader user. When it shut down, I started hosting my own RSS reader: first tt-rss, and later miniflux. I very much liked being able to subscribe to sites and read them at my leisure. I also appreciated not having my reading habits tracked or quantified. I had maybe two dozen f...
What I was really after was the confluence of RSS feeds and Twitter and the ability to post to my own site.
IndieWeb Summit 2018 Recap
Last week was the 8th annual IndieWeb Summit held in Portland, Oregon. While IndieWeb Camps and Summits have traditionally been held on weekends during people’s free time, this one held in the middle of the week was a roaring success. With well over 50 people in attendance, this was almost certainly the largest attendance I’ve seen to date. I suspect since people who flew in for the event had really committed, the attendance on the second day was much higher than usual as well. It was great to see so many people hacking on their personal websites and tools to make their personal online experiences richer.
The year of the Indie Reader
Last year I wrote the post Feed Reader Revolution in response to an increasingly growing need I’ve seen in the social space for a new sort of functionality in feed readers. While there have been a few interesting attempts like Woodwind which have shown a proof-of-concept, not much work had been done until some initial work by Aaron Parecki and a session at last year’s IndieWeb Summit entitled Putting it all Together.
Over the past year I’ve been closely watching Aaron Parecki; Grant Richmond and Jonathan LaCour; Eddie Hinkle; and Kristof De Jaeger’s collective progress on the microsub specification as well as their respective projects Aperture/Monocle; Together; Indigenous/Indigenous for iOS; and Indigenous for Android. As a result in early May I was overjoyed to suggest a keynote session on readers and was stupefied this week as many of them have officially launched and are open to general registration as relatively solid beta web services.
I spent a few minutes in a session at the end of Tuesday and managed to log into Aperture and create an account (#16, though I suspect I may be one of the first to use it besides the initial group of five developers). I also managed to quickly and easily add a microsub endpoint to my website as well. Sadly I’ve got some tweaks to make to my own installation to properly log into any of the reader app front ends. Based on several of the demos I’ve seen over the past months, the functionality involved is not only impressive, but it’s a properly large step ahead of some of the basic user interface provided by the now-shuttered Woodwind.xyz service (though the code is still available for self-hosting.)
Several people have committed to make attempts at creating a microsub server including Jack Jamieson who has announced an attempt at creating one for WordPress after having recently built the Yarns reader for WordPress from scratch this past year. I suspect within the coming year we’ll see one or two additional servers as well as some additional reading front ends. In fact, Ryan Barrett spent the day on Wednesday hacking away at leveraging the News Blur API and leveraging it to make News Blur a front end for Aperture’s server functionality. I’m hoping others may do the same for other popular readers like Feedly or Inoreader to expand on the plurality of offerings. Increased competition for new reader offerings can only improve the entire space.
Even more reading related support
Just before the Summit, gRegor Morrill unveiled the beta version of his micropub client Indiebookclub.biz which allows one to log in with their own website and use it to post reading updates to their own website. For those who don’t yet support micropub, the service saves the data for eventual export. His work on it continued through the summit to continue to improve an already impressive product. It’s the fist micropub client of its kind amidst a growing field of websites (including WordPress and WithKnown which both have plugins) that offer reading post support. Micro.blog has recently updated its code to allow users of the platform the ability to post reads with indiebookclub.biz as well. As a result of this spurt of reading related support there’s now a draft proposal to add read-of and read-status support as new Microformats. Perhaps reads will be included in future updates of the post-type-discovery algorithm as well?
Given the growth of reading post support and a new micropub read client, I suspect it won’t take long before some of the new microsub-related readers begin supporting read post micropub functionality as well.
IndieAuth Servers
In addition to David Shanske’s recent valiant update to the IndieAuth plugin for WordPress, Manton Reece managed to finish up coding work to unveil another implementation of IndieAuth at the Summit. His version is for the micro.blog platform which is a significant addition to the community and will add several hundred additional users who will have broader access to a wide assortment of functionality as a result.
The Future
While work continues apace on a broad variety of fronts, I was happy to see that my proposal for a session on IndieAlgorithms was accepted (despite my leading another topic earlier in the day). It was well attended and sparked some interesting discussion about how individuals might also be able to exert greater control over what they’re presented to consume. With the rise of Indie feed readers this year, the ability to better control and filter one’s incoming content is going to take on a greater importance in the very near future. With an increasing number of readers to choose from, more people will hopefully be able to free themselves from the vagaries of the blackbox algorithms that drive content distribution and presentation in products like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others. Based on the architecture of servers like Aperture, perhaps we might be able to modify some of the microsub spec to allow more freedom and flexibility in what will assuredly be the next step in the evolution of the IndieWeb?
Diversity
While there are miles and miles to go before we sleep, I was happy to have seen a session on diversity pop up at the Summit. I hope we can all take the general topic to heart to be more inclusive and actively invite friends into our fold. Thanks to Jean for suggesting and guiding the conversation and everyone else for continuing it throughout the rest of the summit and beyond.
Other Highlights
Naturally, the above are just a few of the bigger highlights as I perceive them. I’m sure others will appear in the IndieNews feed or other blogposts about the summit. The IndieWeb is something subtly different to each person, so I hope everyone takes a moment to share (on your own sites naturally) what you got out of all the sessions and discussions. There was a tremendous amount of discussion, debate, and advancement of the state of the art of the continually growing IndieWeb. Fortunately almost all of it was captured in the IndieWeb chat, on Twitter, and on video available through either the IndieWeb wiki pages for the summit or directly from the IndieWeb YouTube channel.
I suspect David Shanske and I will have more to say in what is sure to be a recap episode in our next podcast.
Photos
Finally, below I’m including a bunch of photos I took over the course of my trip. I’m far from a professional photographer, but hopefully they’ll give a small representation of some of the fun we all had at camp.
Flight from LAX to SFO en route to PDX
Pre-Summit meetup at Pine Street Market
social meetup at Pine Street Market
A view onto Portland from the Hotel deLuxe
The Eliot Center where IndieWeb Summit 2018 will take place.
The entrance of the Eliot Center
The Eliot Center provided a fantastic location for this year’s Summit
Aaron Parecki kicks off the 2018 IndieWeb Summit
A packed room for the start of the summit
Everyone held in rapt attention.
Tantek provides a solid overview of the State of the Indieweb
Manton Reece and Jean MacDonald present a keynote on the Micro.blog Community and Progress
Manton discusses some of the philosophy behind Micro.blog
Jean MacDonald of Micro.blog talks about community
William Hertling, author of Kill Process, imagines the future of the IndieWeb in his keynote
The conversation on How can we encourage diversity on the IndieWeb?
The diversity conversation continues
Microsub: how to build servers and clients
Microsub: how to build servers and clients
The Microsub conversation continues
The session grid for day one of the Summit
My home away from home during the summit: the Hotel deLuxe
Manton Reece chats with Aaron Parecki at the Micro.blog meetup at Von Ebert Brewing.
Conversations begin over breakfast at the beginning of day two.
Hack day on day two of the summit is about to begin.
Early morning sessions for hack day are announced.
Thanks GoDaddy for sponsoring the caffeine to keep us all going.
It’s a beautiful day at the Eliot Center for the Hack Day at IndieWeb Summit 2018.
I finally take my name tag off as I depart the conference on the way back home to Los Angeles. Thanks everyone!
Final Thanks
People
While I’m thinking about it, I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who came to the summit. You all really made it a fantastic event!
I’d particularly like to thank Aaron Parecki, Tantek Çelik, gRegor Morrill, Marty McGuire, and David Shanske who did a lot of the organizing and volunteer work to help make the summit happen as well as to capture it so well for others to participate remotely or even view major portions of it after-the-fact. I would be remiss if I didn’t thank Martijn van der Ven for some herculean efforts on IRC/Chat in documenting things in real time as well as for some serious wiki gardening along the way. As always, there are a huge crew of others whose contributions large and small help to make up the rich fabric of the community and we wouldn’t be who we are without your help. Thank you all! (Or as I might say in chat: community++).
And finally, a special personal thanks to Greg McVerry for kindly letting me join him at the Hotel deLuxe for some late night discussions on the intersection of IndieWeb and Domain of One’s Own philosophies as they dovetail with the education sector. With growing interest and a wealth of ideas in this area, I’m confident it’s going to be a rapidly growing one over the coming years.
Sponsors
I’d also like to take a moment to say thanks to all the sponsors who helped to make the event a success including Name.com, GoDaddy, Okta, Mozilla, DreamHost, and likely a few others who I’m missing at the moment.
I’d also like to thank the Eliot Center for letting us hosting the event at their fabulous facility.
I maintain a few lists of #IndieWeb related influencers:
Twitter List: https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/lists/indieweb/members
Following list: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Indieweb
OPML file (for more easily mass following via RSS): https://www.boffosocko.com/wp-links-opml.php?link_cat=1521
Please ping me if you or someone you know should be included or was overlooked somehow. Obviously you have more street cred if the canonical place to follow you is on your own website.
I find that it’s nice that I can follow fewer and fewer people on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, et al. because they’ve begun owning all of their content on their own website where I can get as much of it as I like in my feed reader without having to subscribe to or try to read their content in dozens of different places with algorithms impeding my personal preferences.
👓 Google News Drops RSS Feed Subscription Buttons | Search Engine Roundtable
With the new Google News, they didn't just drop the standout tag and editors pick but it seems like the direct method to subscribe to Google News via RSS and Google News keyword searches is gone.